Surreal Friends

April 6, 2000|By JOHN TANASYCHUK Staff Writer

In the 1950s, when Rosalind Gersten was beginning her career as a buyer for Macy's, she received an introduction that would change her sensibilities, if not her life. Just before Gersten's first buying trip to Paris, a friend in New York introduced her to an American collector and artist who lived outside of Paris.

Through that introduction, Gersten met a group of artists who at this point in the fickle history of art had fallen out of favor. But those artists were the surrealists -- Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Matta and Yves Tanguy and Dorothea Tanning.

They were also her friends.

That makes "Sweet Dreams and Nightmares: Dada and Surrealism from the Rosalind and Melvin Jacobs Collection," at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, all the sweeter.

Each piece tells a story, not only about the artist, but also about the life of an eager, fashionable young woman with a mind open to all things visual. When she married Melvin Jacobs, then a merchandise manager at Bloomingdale's, a few years after those initial introductions, he too became part of this intimate circle.

How was it that she was able to befriend a group of artists the age of her parents and grandparents?

"I think that I was young and I think I might have been pretty and cute perhaps," Rosalind Jacobs said last week as she wondered if the earrings Man Ray had made for her were too much with the Chanel dress she was thinking about wearing to the show's opening party. "And I was coming to Paris with the responsibility of buying a category of merchandise for Macy's. Fashion always fascinated them. Man Ray was an eminent fashion photographer."

Ray had decided at this point that he wanted nothing more to do with fashion photography and was concentrating on painting. He had already perfected a technique he called rayograph, in which he would place objects on light-sensitive paper. When light was cast over the object, the image of the object was left. The result was a photographic image without a negative.

The Ray image on the show's catalog is one of his most famous works. Le Violon d'Ingresfrom 1924 employs both rayograph and traditional photography, where the back of a woman's naked body resembles a cello. It's the image that was used in advertising campaigns for last year's movie, The Red Violin.

"Man Ray really had no income at all," says Jacobs, whose husband died in 1993. "They lived under great privation. As much as I could in my own small way, I would try to buy things from him so they would have money."

The first piece she owned, and still one of her favorites, is a painting by Rene Magritte, L'Eloge de la Dialectique. It was given to her by Bill Copley, an artist, collector and son of newspaper tycoon Ira C. Copley. The painting shows a window with open shutters. Inside, the window is another house. "You just had the feeling that this could go on infinitum," says Jacobs. "It just seemed like a natural thing. They took their dreams, their subconscious, their conscious thoughts and put them all together and it came out as surrealism."

The painting hung in the foyer of Bill and Norma Copley's home outside Paris. When they took it off the wall for her to take home, Jacobs was beside herself. It was not only her first surrealist piece, but also one that comes with a story.

On the plane home to New York, she picked up the envelope the painting had been packaged in and it was empty. "I was almost hysterical. They couldn't calm me down," she remembers. Two weeks later, it showed up in the Paris airport's lost and found.

That was just the kind of story that drew Bonnie Clearwater to the collection. As MoCA's director and chief curator, Clearwater says she'd known about the Jacobs collection but didn't realize what a personal story it told until she visited Jacobs in New York.

"These are extensions of her life, rather than something she's amassed as a collector," says Clearwater. "She was amazed that I could actually see that there was an exhibition in this."

Jacobs has lent some of the works for important shows. "But this is the first time [her collection] has been shown as a group, as a story," says Clearwater.

The MoCA exhibit also displays many of the letters between Jacobs and the surrealists. Writing in the show's catalog, Clearwater points out what good timing Jacobs had when she was buying these works. A New York Times headline of a 1963 Man Ray exhibition read "Man Ray, The Forgotten Prophet." A Duchamp retrospective was put on the same year, not in New York, but in backwater Pasadena, Calif.

The show was also a way for Jacobs to take stock of the condition of the works in the show. Clearwater made sure everything was documented, archived and reframed.

That part of it has made Jacobs feel a bit strange.

"They're all of my personal things and suddenly to see them on the wall of a museum is hard to reconcile," says Jacobs, who lives in New York and Fisher Island. "It's like a part of me is on display."

Through her association with the surrealists, art became essential to her personal and professional life.

She eventually became fashion administrator at Macy's. Her husband headed Burdines and Bloomingdale's. In 1968, when Macy's planned a storewide British invasion, she included an exhibition of 15 young British artists, including David Hockney. Melvin Jacobs introduced Isamu Noguchi's paper lamps to the general public.

When the Jacobses lived in Miami from 1972 to 1982, she was appointed to the Board of Governors for what is now the Miami Art Museum.

In late February, when her daughter, Peggy, turned 40, Jacobs took the opportunity to point out at her birthday party that she was almost a Leap Year baby. Instead of celebrating Peggy's 40th birthday, Jacobs created a party for a 10-year-old. There were even toys for each of the guests.

Says Jacobs: "I thought that was kind of surreal."

John Tanasychuk can be reached at jtanasychuk@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4632.